It was all Australian’s had been hearing for weeks (other than the Olympics) – August 9 was Census night.
But on the night the biggest online flop in Australia’s history played out. The site first became unresponsive, then it failed all-together, including DNS becoming unavailable. When the front page of the census.abs.gov.au was reachable it was almost always impossible to reach the pages that contained the 2016 census form.
The ABS itself had been batting away concerns around privacy, and in doing so had proudly announced it was ready to protect Australia’s privacy, and also ready to meet the expected demand.
Of course the knives were out immediately. IBM, who were providing hosting, became one target. The business that had won the tender to perform load testing also came under fire on Twitter.
So where was the fault?
Danny Bishop 